In the introduction to the Penguin edition of D.H.Lawrence's, The Complete Poems, a critic says that DHL is 'poet without a mask' and this is really what he is: his poems (with the exception of his early rhyming poems) are beautiful effusions of feeling and imagination free from masks of poetic convention or bourgeois comportment. In a way they are slightly mad, but of the spiritual madness type rather than the mental type, or maybe a little of both. Perhaps they are influenced by his chronic TB. Anyhow you cannot fail to be swept along on these ranting flourishes even if you feel that he has gone beyond the envelope. He could be compared with Walt Whitman; but Walt for all his randy unorthodoxy was still a Victorian in manner and unkempt mode. Of the literary types, 'priests, prophets and purveyors' DHL is definitely among the prophets. As a prophetic writer he speaks to the core of man and to the eternal. He speaks less to our particular time because we are not moved by any man's mighty soul; now there are no great men. It takes a flame to catch onto another flame.
FLOWERS AND MEN
Flowers achieve their own floweriness and it is a miracle.
Men don't achieve their own manhood, alas, oh alas! alas!
All I want of you, men and women,
all I want of you
is that you shall achieve your own beauty
as the flowers do.
Oh leave off saying I want you to be savages.
Tell me, is the gentian savage, at the top of the course stem?
Oh what in you can answer to this blueness?
[I want you to be a savage] as the gentian and the daffodil.
Tell me! tell me! is there in you a beauty to compare
to the honeysuckle at evening now
pouring out his breath.
PRAYER
Give me the moon at my feet
Put my feet upon the crescent, like a Lord!
O let my ankles be bathed in moon light, that I
may go
sure and moon-shod, cool and bright-footed
towards my goal.
For the sun is hostile now
his face is like the red lion.
